ArticlePsychological science2018
Symmetric Objects Become Special in Perception Because of Generic Computations in Neurons.
Article in Psychological science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- FLAIR extending beyond a quadrant (FEQ) of the cerebrum as a qualitative imaging biomarker: a conceptual proposition and proof-of-principle.Clinical & experimental metastasis · 2025Article
- Visual homogeneity computations in the brain enable solving property-based visual tasks.eLife · 2025Article
- What do we see behind an occluder? Amodal completion of statistical properties in complex objects.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Letter processing in upright bigrams predicts reading fluency variations in children.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2022Article
- Using compositionality to understand parts in whole objects.The European journal of neuroscience · 2022Review
- A separable neural code in monkey IT enables perfect CAPTCHA decoding.Journal of neurophysiology · 2022Article
- The Contribution of Shape Features and Demographic Variables to Disembedding Abilities.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- How the forest interacts with the trees: Multiscale shape integration explains global and local processing.Journal of vision · 2020Article
- A compositional neural code in high-level visual cortex can explain jumbled word reading.eLife · 2020Article
- Multiplicative mixing of object identity and image attributes in single inferior temporal neurons.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Symmetry is a salient visual property: It is easy to detect and influences perceptual phenomena from segmentation to recognition. Yet researchers know little about its neural basis. Using recordings from single neurons in monkey IT cortex, we asked whether symmetry-being an emergent property-induces nonlinear interactions between object parts. Remarkably, we found no such deviation: Whole-object responses were always the sum of responses to the object's parts, regardless of symmetry. The only defining characteristic of symmetric objects was that they were more distinctive compared with asymmetric objects. This was a consequence of neurons preferring the same part across locations within an object. Just as mixing diverse paints produces a homogeneous overall color, adding heterogeneous parts within an asymmetric object renders it indistinct. In contrast, adding identical parts within a symmetric object renders it distinct. This distinctiveness systematically predicted human symmetry judgments, and it explains many previous observations about symmetry perception. Thus, symmetry becomes special in perception despite being driven by generic computations at the level of single neurons.
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